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Tym Blogs Too!

The random web scribblings of a person with too many thoughts and too little time

Thursday, July 24, 2008

I don't have a spillproof mug but ...

After yesterday's misadventure, this is where I place my coffee cup now.

The placement of a coffee mug

It might still get tipped over, but at least it's on a chair, below where the laptop sits.

The Kleenex isn't there to mop up spills, by the way. It's usually on the table, but this morning I stuck it there 'cause I needed more immediate access to tend to my sniffly nose (it's reacting to the unseasonably cool weather).

At least I'm not resorting to a sippy cup.

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posted by Tym at 5:13 PM

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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

What kind of a dork am I?

The kind of dork that spills coffee on her laptop AGAIN. And this time, neither cat was in the vicinity so I can't pini it on them.

One minute I'm saying hi to beeker online, the next minute there's coffee over half the table, and too much of it on the Macbook. And then the Macbook decides to go black as I wiping down the keyboard (while knowing in my heart from the previous experience that I'll need to take it in anyway, because any minute now the keys will start sticking together) and doesn't boot up anymore.

I hope it's just a short-circuited motherboard and not any hard drive damage, because I have 4,000 words of a new chapter of the book I'm co-writing in there.

4,000 words. Not backed up because I only finished it yesterday.

Dammit.

All right, instead of dwelling on my ownself-sabo-ownself troubles, let me tally the things I have to be grateful for despite this morning's clumsy little SNAFU:
I really hope I can retrieve that 4,000 word document.

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posted by Tym at 9:47 AM

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Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Pure heaven

I really like the "taste" of ice-cold water, but it tastes even better after a cup of rich black coffee.

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posted by Tym at 4:51 PM

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Friday, July 18, 2008

Wordiness: grawlix

I didn't know I didn't know this word, till I came across this question:
"What does one call the use of random non-alphabet characters to indicate cursing?"
You know: *^!*@&#^(^$#@(*(*@$(#^*$

The answer: "grawlix", and it dates back to 1964. See the full explanation at Ask H&FJ.

(Via Swissmiss.)

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posted by Tym at 7:25 PM

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Thursday, July 17, 2008

Miles to go before I ...

Sisu mid-yawn

Jude asked me today how work was going, to which I said:
Then I said: "I feel tired thinking about it."

Maybe this is why mornings are getting harder.

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posted by Tym at 5:38 PM

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Mornings are getting harder

11 o'clock

So far this week, I have:
I'm not overworked at the moment, so I'm not sure where all this un-wakefulness is coming from ...

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posted by Tym at 11:54 AM

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Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Government websites: the good, the bad and the ugly

The good

I needed to start looking at some 2009 dates for work, which entailed knowing when certain public holidays are, so I took myself over to the Ministry of Manpower website. As always, they faithfully list the public holidays for the following year, but now they've gone one better and provided the dates in an iCal format.

So all I had to do was download the iCal file and let Google Calendar import it. Easy-peasy. Importing information from the web into real life should always be this easy.

The bad

Okay, first off, let's make things clear: I like the library. I love books, and books live in the library where people can borrow many interesting ones for free, so I love the library. You don't have to make me go there or want to use it or want to like it. I'm sold. Tell me that I can access library materials or services online, and I'm thrilled that it saves me a trip down to the physical location.

(See how many times I used italics in that paragraph?)

That said, what the hell has happened to the National Library website? Or websites, I should say, because where before http://www.nlb.gov.sg served all library needs in one place, they recently decided to split their web presence into three domains:
To which I'm like, we're a nation-state, isn't our National Library already a public library? And where do I go to find what information? And why the hell do the sites take so damn long to load if the web assets have been divided up? And why the hell aren't any links, including "Contact info", working? (That last complaint occurred yesterday on pl.sg; within a couple of hours they emailed me to say that the links were working again.)

To quote from my email to the helpdesk yesterday:
I don't know what else doesn't work, but I'm tired of trying to find anything on this website. I miss the old NLB website. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't as frustrating and impossible as the new ones.
I can only conclude that they're trying to be deliberately inefficient and, as I said to a web-savvy friend over IM:
maybe their secret plan
is to frustrate people
so we HAVE to go to the brick and mortar library
The ugly

Uh ... take your pick. Most government websites give me eye pain.

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posted by Tym at 10:50 PM

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Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Yan Yan teaches you English

When I first started eating Yan Yan in the '80s, they came in two flavours --- chocolate or strawberry (feel free to say that in a "Okay Pocky" voice) --- and the biscuit sticks were plain and unadorned.

Now the biscuit sticks try to teach you English.

Yan Yan teaches you English

More accurately, they try to teach word association in English. This is what the sticks say (the animal name is on the top end of the stick, the rest of the words on the lower half):
Now what I want to know is: who gets to be the copywriter for the Yan Yan sticks, and where can I sign up?

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posted by Tym at 11:48 AM

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